...And at the end of it [self-appraisal] he knew, and with the knowledge came the definite sense of new direction toward which he had long been groping, that the dark ancestral cae, the womb from which mankind emerged into the light, forever pulls one back--but that you can't go home again.
The phrase had many implications for him. You can't go back to your family, back home to your childhood, back home to romantic love, back home to a young man's dreams of glory and of fame, back home to exile, to escape to Europe and some foreign land, back home to lyricism, to singing just for singing's sake, back home to aestheticism, to one's youthful idea of "the artist" and the ideal....(Thomas Wolfe's "You Can't Go Home Again")
This quote starts on page 706 of a hard-covered edition. Here is another quote from an google publication of Wolfe's novel, page 664:
He saw now that you can't go home again--not ever. There was no road back. Ended for him, with the sharp and clean finality of the closing of a door, was the time of his dark roots, like those of a pot-bound plant, could not be left to feed upon their own substance and nourish their own little self-absorbed designs. Henceforth, they must be spread outward--away from the hidden, secret, and unfathomed past that holds man's spirit prisoner--outward, outward toward the rich and life-giving soil of a new freedom in the wide world of all humanity. And there came to him a vision of man's true home, beyond the ominous and cloud-engulfed horizon of the here and now, in the green and hopeful and still-virgin meadows of the future. (664)
In one of his songs, Bob Seger sang,"I wish I didn't know now what I didn't know then." How often have people wished to return to an innoncence now lost! Wolfe's novel is truly inspiring as it urges its readers "beyond...the cloud-engulfed horizon of the here and now" in which so many are mired.
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